Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Psalm 139:1-14(CEB)

Mark 2:23-3:6 (CEB)

Summertime and the living is easy….

Though for some of us, it isn’t. Summer is supposed to be break time, vacations and slower pace, lazy days and easy living. Sometimes it means that you work just as hard, you just sweat more. Maybe you’re in heat & air, or you own a pool. Maybe you’re a parent trying to figure out what to do with the kids every day, or a grandparent who is solution #1 to that problem. Maybe you’re one of the many teachers who just starts the next job as summer begins.

It is good to take a break. In fact, I think God wants us to take a break. It’s not something I do very well, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think I should. That’s what the sabbath is all about, a divinely-commanded, fully authorized break. It is the ultimate excuse to not mow the yard, isn’t it? GOD told me not to? I mean, Iwant to, but it’s the law…

We have to be very careful, I think, when we head into the world of Biblical law. My beginning point, and I suspect it is the same for many of you, is that the Bible is NOT inerrant. It is not the written words of God handed down from a cloud in King James’ English. It is a document produced by human beings, many of whom felt they were speaking with or even for God, and then filtered through centuries of culture and translation, sometimes from languages that are no longer even spoken. So when we say the Bible reveals a law from God, there is some work to be done…even in the summer.

When Jesus tells the Pharisees that “The Sabbath was created for humans; humans weren’t created for the Sabbath”, he is directly contradicting not only Jewish culture and tradition, but scripture itself. After all, the idea of “sabbath” is coded into the Torah, even God rests on the seventh day of creation. And Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and several other books assert multiple times that observance of the sabbath is mandatory, and not doing it is punishable, sometimes by death. They are SERIOUS about break time! So, the idea that ‘humanity was made for the Sabbath’ is pretty much status quo at Jesus’ time. Frankly, it continues to be a wildly popular theology today. Maybe not so much the sabbath part, for while we used to have “blue laws” that kept places closed on Sundays, we now have moved past even an acknowledgment of Sunday observance. Soccer tournaments, dance recitals, volleyball, gymnastics, the shift of kids’ activities, shopping, gas and movie theaters, none of those places are hands off on Sundays anymore. Maybe it’s because fewer people go to church, maybe it’s because there is growing awareness that Christianity isn’t the only religion.

So maybe the sabbath isn’t the best example, but the theology of what Jesus is up to in this passage is very clearly present in our world. The Pharisees were a particular expression of Judaism. And they went by the law. They wielded it, in fact, making sure that others were living up to it with public shaming and wooden, literal interpretations. Thatwe still know something about, especially here in the buckle of the Bible Belt. For us it goes like this – God wrote the Bible, every word of which is literally true, and God loves us somuch that humanity better live up to it…or else. In that theology, I’ll call it 90% theology because of how prevalent it is, God is chiefly known as holy, the Bible is the single arbiter of all decisions and humans have to achieve a certain levelof holiness – through following laws and clinging to justifying Biblical scriptures – to be acceptable to God.

This leaves us trying to take rules established for a certain set of people two to four thousand years ago and make them fit in our time and place, like fitting that square peg into that round hole…eventually you have to use a hammer. While it may be driven by the intention to teach morality, there are often wrong ways to do the right thing. The problem with trying to legislate morality is that you have to be very careful and precise when you write the law. In my experience, all a legalistic approach seems to do is encourage people to find loopholes. And if you don’t have them all sewn up, well…they’re off the hook. Teenagers are really good at this. Hey, you didn’t tell me to unload the dishwashertoday…you never said that I was supposed to clean up my clothes AND my shoes…you said to be home at 10pm, you never said what time zone! OK, that last one is a little far-fetched, but I promise you it has been tried. All of a sudden, instead of embracing the spiritof the law, we are bending the letter of the law and doing away with the whole intention for the effort in the first place.

Jesus actually works directly against this idea over and over again in our Gospels. It’s one of the primary reasons the religious authorities don’t like him. It’s not that Jesus is against the laws, in fact more than one Gospel has him claim, rather ominously, that he has not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it. Jesus seems to know that when we practice faith legalistically, as if it were just a set of rules to check-off, we cheapen it’s claim on us and domesticate God to a place where we can handle God. We make God’s relational and transforming love into a transaction and we cheapen God’s grace into conditionality. We don’t embrace what the law is meant to instillin us, we don’t let the laws shape and mold our hearts. So, instead of building some resiliency and discernment in ourselves, we make God a machine that works on a set of gears called “shame” and “reward.”

Jesus pushes back against this and in story after story he breaks the rules, not for the sake of breaking the rules, or because he doesn’t think that the sabbath is a good idea, or that we don’t have to live moral lives. Please note that the text says he it is with anger and grief over their intransigent hearts that he pulls the man with the withered hand up higher so that everyone can see him when he asks his provocative question that demands they weigh doing good over keeping the rule.  In this even and so many others, Jesus tells almost everyone who will listen that their God is too small. If they cannot see past the Sabbath instruction far enough to know that they still need to eat, or that someone needs help, or to have compassion for a man with a withered hand who needs healing, they are missing the point. This is why I think that the lectionary missed the boat when they made their cut of the passage we heard today. They skipped the paragraphs just before this when Jesus says that you cannot put new wine into old wineskins. Perhaps we don’t hear the metaphor anymore since we don’t really use wineskins, but it is a claim that we cannot experience newness that God has for us if we think God is confined to the traditions, or the doctrines, or, one might say today, even the Bible. We need to hear that to remind us, as Jesus did those who were around him, that change only comes when we allow our hearts to be moved, when we shift the way that we seek to relate to God and to each other AND when we acknowledge, as many times as possible, that God is far bigger than our own hearts, far larger than our doctrines and theologies and certainly far more loving than we are.

When we encounter something new that feels and acts like God, even though it defies all of our old expectations, then we may need to throw out our old wineskin to make room for that new wine. That’s not to say that our old rituals are no good and we should throw them out. What I mean by that is that we have to re-imagine things, we have to infuse tradition with new life. Let’s take this table as an example. This is one of the foundational rituals of our faith, one of our sacraments. But what does it evoke in us? Is this a table of membership, only open to those who have professed and been baptized – in the “right” way, of course? Is this a table that is only for Christians, because Jesus was always so proprietary? Is this the table where the transubstantiation happens, where the bread and wine become the body and the blood?

Perhaps you see this differently in our time and place, I know I do. Because I think that where people are excluded from the church, we see this as a table of inclusion. Where some cherry-pick from a laundry list of so-called “sins” and neglect hard work of parsing out context but instead demonize a particular group of people, do we see this as a table where God reaches out and pulls up another chair, drawing the circle wider, making the table bigger? Where some have placed walls around this table, making God inaccessible to others, do we hear the inspiration of Jesus himself reminding us that God is available to everyone, that purity is not a requirement to be in the presence of the Holy and that our wounds and transgressions don’t keep us from God’s – God’s love covers them, like a soft bandage or a healing balm.

That, to me, is what we celebrate at this table. So, this morning I am here to remind you that our God is too small, too limited by our own prejudices and lack of imagination, too domesticated by our adherence to some set of rules or to the laws of rationality or reason. But here’s the Good News…the table is big. There’s a seat for you, you who are fearfully and wonderfully made. Here in this simple meal we can belong and learn how to trust again. Here with this small nourishment we can trust and learn to hope again. Here with a nibble and a sip we can hope and learn how to be in the presence of the God who passes all our understanding, the God who resides here too, ready to re-imagine with us, new wine at a time in which we might not be able to imagine how things will turn out, or how to rest, or what restoration can come when the living isn’t easy. God is bigger than that, and when we cannot see how it might happen we can trust in this – God will make a way, beyond our laws, beyond the boxes in which we have carefully placed God, beyond the limit of our own vision. God will make a way.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Guest Preacher for Pentecost — Rev. Kayla Bonewell, from Church of the Open Arms, UCC and Cathedral of Hope, UCC in Oklahoma City

Contemporary ReadingWhat the Fire Gives: A Blessing for Pentecost Day by Jan Richardson

You had thought that fire only consumed, only devoured, only took for itself, leaving merely ash and memory of something you had thought, if not permanent, would be long enough, enduring enough, to be nearly eternal. So when you felt the scorch on your lips, the searing in your heart, you could not at first believe that flame could be so generous, that when it came to you — you, in your sackcloth and sorrow — it did not come to consume, to take still more than everything. What surprised you most were not the syllables that spilled from your scalded, astonished mouth —though that was miracle enough, to have words burn through what had been numb, to find your tongue aflame with a language you did not know you knew —no, what came as greatest gift was to be so heard in the place of your deepest silence, to be so seen within the blazing, to be met with such completeness by what the fire gives.

Acts 2:1-20

Today, near the 2000^thbirthday of the Christian church, give or take a few decades, we retell the birth narrative of this amazing community known to us as Christianity.

This is the story of our birth. It appeared that God was pregnant, and ready to deliver a new child who would be named “The Way,” or in later years, would earn the nickname “Christianity.” This was not God’s firstborn, as God had already given birth many times over. God had carried to full term the galaxies, solar systems, and planets. The water, air, fire, and soil of the Earth. The creatures both crawling, swimming, and winged. God had also birthed compassionate communities time and again; the Buddhists who were taught how to alleviate the suffering of sentient beings, the Jewish folk through the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, and many other tribes and peoples, too numerous to recount within this birth narrative. But, on the eve of our birth, people from all over the land were gathered together in one place for a special occasion. They were gathered to celebrate the Jewish festival of Pentecost. The word “Pentecost” came from the Greek word for “fiftieth.” Fifty days after Moses told Pharaoh to “let my people go,” after the Hebrew’s exodus from Egypt and slavery, after they watched their oppressors disappear from sight after crossing through the Red Sea, fifty days after all of that, Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. So, the people were gathered from all over to commemorate that day when God had given them instructions for how to be God’s people, how to live together with compassionate. This festival of Pentecost has been known by other names as well. The Feast of Weeks, the Day of First Fruits, or Shavuot (Shav-u-ot), but no matter what they called it, God choose this gathering to become the day of birth for the Christian church.

It’s unclear whether they knew that God was pregnant; God was certainly showing, but as we learn through experience, it can be impolite to assume pregnancy. Many tell-tale signs were apparent, none the less. For one, Jesus had promised that God would be sending them a helper, an Advocate, the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ proclamation in the 14^thchapter of John, verse 6, “I will ask Abba, who will give you another Advocate to be with you forever,” had became the equivalent of a positive pregnancy test. New life was more than just a gleam in the eye. Another indication of God’s pregnancy had to do with the cycle of life and death. We don’t always notice how the two are connected, but new birth regularly rises up after the death and passing of a loved one. It had been almost two months since the crucifixion of God’s beloved son, Jesus, whom they called “The Christ.”

So, when the Feast of Pentecost came, without warning, God’s water broke, and there was a sound like a strong gale force that filled the entire building. Like wildfire, the Holy Spirit spread throughout the people. After they were filled to the brim and overflowing with spirit, the people stood face to face and suddenly, where there had been confusion, there was now understanding. Where there had been discord, there was now unity. Where there had been distance, there was now embrace. It was all so glorious and unheard of; many thought it must be the effect of alcohol, but that was not the case. Although folks had come from different zip codes, economic status,’ educational experiences, and cultural understandings, everyone was empowered to respond to one another, not as “other” or “foreigner,” but as respected and beloved equals. All were gifted with the motivation and ability to meet one another where they were. To speak in the language and manner with which someone else was most accustomed.

Some rightfully asked, “What’s going on here.” What are we bearing witness to? That’s when Peter stood up, with Jesus’ other eleven understudies, and spoke with bold urgency. He recounted the ancient promises from the prophet Joel; “God’s spirit will erupt in a birth blazing fire. A quenching holiness that can be poured again and again upon creation, gifting it with marvel and miracle. You will know that a fresh batch of spirit has appeared whenever young folks, your very sons and daughters, begin to speak up and speak out. Whenever your elders hear God’s prompting and wisdom within their nightly REM cycles. This pouring out of God’s spirit is never discriminating. The spirt both drips and burns within the first and the last. The least and the most. The little and the large. Even those whom we discount, leave out, silence, or ignore have received barrel-fulls of holiness. So, if you want to see true wonders above and below, then you will have to face one another and see God’s spirit emanating from every living being. Call each other by your true name, which is beloved. Once you do this, my saving, healing, restoring, and redeeming power will be ignited.” That day, after God’s spirit spoke through Peter, three thousand were baptized, and the Christian church’s birth certificate was officially signed, sealed, and delivered.

Happy Birthday Church. Ours is a powerful story, and as is tradition on birthdays, we can’t help but stand against the kitchen doorframe and record how much we’ve grown this past year. Our growth is not measured in tick marks of tallness, but rather by a depth of heart, a wideness of welcome, a healing of humanity.

In the center of my mother’s bible are hand-written notes about the progress and milestones of her family. The date of her child’s first steps, a report about the last baby tooth placed underneath a pillow. What will you write down in the center of your Bible this year, regarding the church’s growth. A note about a new ministry meeting the needs of the neighborhood? An injustice confronted? A child nourished? A stranger turned friend?

At birthdays, we also look at what has not yet come to pass. When we’re young, we think by age such and such, we will know everything. Then of course, when we reach that age, we look around and think, “Really? This doesn’t feel like I thought that it would. Surely I should know more than I do by this age.”

At the age of 2000, one might think that church should have it all together. That we would have perfected our practices of faith. That good news would be in abundance for the poor, release would be readily available for those who are bound, that the oppressed would be free from burden, and everyone would have the ability to see clearly.

We are not yet too big for our britches, as we still have more maturing to do. Today is not only Pentecost, the church’s birthday, but it is also Mental Health Sunday. Since 1949 the month of May has been set aside as a time to raise awareness and educate the public about mental health and un-wellness.

In the beginning, the church was supposed to be a place where you were truly seen, for all that you had experienced, endured, overcome, and sometimes still struggled with. But over time, it became a place to dress up for. A place to bring one’s tidied-up-self, to show up looking all put together. This practice is not one of faith, but of falsehood. Jeff Brown, author, filmmaker and grounded spiritualist, says this.

Quote “So many people get judged when they refuse to put their pain away. They get judged for showing it, for speaking it, for insisting on sharing their memories of abuse with those they know. I am not talking about those overwhelming strangers with their stuff—I am talking about legitimate sharings with those they are connected with in daily life. All too often, they are fed one repressive message or another: “Don’t look back,” “What’s done is done,” “Don’t be a victim,” “Your feelings are an illusion,” “Be strong.” What is ironic about this is that those who insist on embodying and expressing their feelings are actually the courageous ones—unwilling and unable to live a false life. Their stuff is breaking through their defenses because they are tired of carrying the weight of buried truths. They want a healthier and more authentic life. Those who seek to shame their revealings are actually less courageous, turning to repressive mantras in an effort to bypass their own unresolved feelings and memories. If they can shut others down, they can remain shut down themselves. But shut down doesn’t take us anywhere good. If we don’t deal with our stuff, it deals with us. May we all speak our truths, before our buried truths destroy us. Out with the old, in with the true.” End Quote. https://www.facebook.com/SOULSHAPING/posts/10156792265745982

I think on our list of birthday goals during our next trip around the sun, we might benefit from vowing to fully see one another. Because to truly be seen is healing. And to suffer in silence is harming. Mental health and un-wellness is one of those conditions that our culture turns its back on. Something that gets whispered about, shame piled, or swept under the rug, because we don’t always know how to treat it, fix it, heal it, or live with it. But from our sacred birth story, we are given one of the most healing salves in all the world. The gift of soaking in God’s Spirit. To recognize that spirit poured out upon all around us. To turn face to face and truly see one another as beloved. When we do this, we are able to communicate in a language understood by all; the language of love, respect, dignity, and equality.

I did not awake early enough on Saturday morning to watch the royal wedding of Harry and Meghan, but I did hear the wedding sermon given by The Most Reverend Michael Bruce Curry, presiding bishop of the American Episcopal Church. His homily focused on the redemptive power of love, which the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said will make of this old world a new one. He noted the impact that harnessing the power of fire has had upon humankind. Fire, that symbol of Pentecost. Rev. Curry preached, quote, “Fire, to a great extent, made human civilization possible. Fire, made it possible to cook food…to heat warm environments…there was no Bronze, Age without fire. No Iron Age without fire. No Industrial Revolution without fire. The advances of science and technology are greatly dependent on the human ability and capacity to take fire and use it for human good.” The Rev. compared the enormous impact of the harnessing of fire to the great healing our world couldexperience if we were able to capture the energy of another kind of fire, the energy of love.

Hear his words, “When love is the way, unselfish, sacrificial, redemptive…then no child will go to bed hungry in this world ever again. When love is the way, we will let justice roll down like a mighty stream and righteousness like an ever-flowing brook. When love is the way, poverty will become history. When love is the way, the Earth will be a sanctuary. When love is the way, we will lay down our swords and shields, down by the riverside, to study war no more. When love is the way, there’s plenty good room…for all of god’s children, because when love is the way, we actually treat each other well, like we are actually family. When love is the way, we know that god is the source of us all and we are brothers and sisters, children of god.” https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a20754692/royal-wedding-sermon-michael-curry-full-transcript/

Sounds like a vision of Pentecost to me. May love be ourway during this next trip around the sun. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

John 3:1-8 (CEB)

Romans 8:12-17 (CEB)

It’s all the rage these days to have a DNA test and see where you came from, sometimes a far cry from the family stories about where you came from. Have you seen the ancestry commercial where the man talks about all the lederhosen he bought and the sauerkraut he ate only to find, thanks to ancestry.com, that he’s actually Scottish? So, now he’s got kilts and eats, I don’t know…boiled sheep stomachs?

Our identity is tied up quite a bit in who our family is, or who we thinkthey are, or who we decide they are. After all, the whole business of “family” has undergone some major renovations. Sure, we have biological family, but my own family isn’t limited to that. I have siblings who are not blood relations to me, people who aren’t even in my genealogy who I call family and so do many of you. Even Jesus on the cross creates a new family with his dying breaths, connecting his mother Mary to the disciple known only as the beloved one. Family just happens.

This is the theme that Paul uses, affirming for his church members their place in God’s family. See, Paul was living at a time in which everything as tribal, including your relationship with God, or with gods. In order to accept a particular version of God, you had to become part of that family. And for Judaism, this meant a lengthy and pretty invasive process. So, Paul’s assertion is that we are adopted…Jesus’s faithfulness means weget adopted, too. Good news, that big estate of your hairdresser’s second cousin’s great nephew’s uncle left? You are an heir now, too. Paul uses the language of his time, language of inheritance and family position, to explain that Jesus has granted us an access to God that was there all the time. It is Jesus’ faithfulness, his dedication to compassion and loving kindness and relationship – across all the boundaries we set between one another – that opens up the path to God. That is, in part, what I think Jesus means when he says the kin-dom is all around us. That’s our inheritance, a world of hope and compassion that exists already, though we are too blinded by so many things to see it.

Paul also tells his readers how difficult this is for us to grasp, even to accept. Jesus says much the same to Nicodemus, inviting him to imagine that this life “in the Spirit” is like being born again, born from above, Jesus says, as God’s children, precious and beloved by God. And Nicodemus says, “Huh?” That’s a paraphrase from the Greek. It’s like we all want to be in the family, but we refuse to be in the family. I’ve had so many encounters over the past week, whether at the wonderful event at B’Nai Emunah reading the Book of Ruth for Shavu’ot, or preaching to new faces in Oklahoma City at Pentecost or hearing from friends in a variety of places where our “unity” feels as thin as tissue paper, and our family circles feel smaller. All of these encounters helped those involved to feel more connected, to see that in relationship, true compassionate, seek-to-understand relationship, we find the presence of God.

Naturally this brings me to talking about the doctrine of the Trinity. And now you’re all having your own Nicodemus moment – “Huh?” Allow me to elaborate, please. Today is Trinity Sunday or, if you are from a higher church tradition, the Feast of the Blessed and Holy Trinity. Mention of the trinity, perhaps ironic from our bible-centric point of view, is not found in the Bible. Instead it is a doctrine which some say can be found as early as the first century, but most consider a development of later Christianity – say 3^rdto 5^thcenturies – and was the cause, as doctrines often are, of many church battles, some quite literal, and innumerable declarations of heresy. The doctrine is claimed as one of our great mysteries of faith, namely that God is one but three coeternal consubstantial persons or hypostases —the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—as “one God in three Divine Persons”, or 1+1+1=1. Now if all of that is confusing to you, welcome to the club. I don’t understand the Trinity as a doctrine, even St. Augustine said it was beyond him. Yet it was a way to try and explain the unexplainable reality that God is elusive to our definitions and resistant to our rationality…and the invisible God is most clearly seen in relationships.

It has been the Celts, often labeled as heretics by the Church Catholic, who have most readily and fully illuminated any sense of trinity for me. They help because the Celts don’t feel the need to make things work out intellectually. And that’s good, because the trinity (and family for that matter) aren’t really rational things, they are experiential things. So the Celts celebrate the analogies for the trinity, like the famous three-leaf clover of St. Patrick, or the idea of water, which can be ice, vapor and liquid, though all are still water. Of course, that’s also a heresy known as modalism. But I digress…

Where the connection exists for me is the idea that God is relationship. Not God has relationship, but God IS relationship. Commentator David Lose says it this way – what the doctrine of the Trinity tries to get to is that from the very beginning of time the dynamic power of love that is at the heart of God’s identity and character can onlybe captured – and that, Paul said, in a glass, but dimly – by thinking of the love that is shared. And so God’s essential and core being has always been a giving and receiving and sharing of love that finally spills out into the whole of the universe and invites all of us into it. First through creation and God’s series of covenants, then and pre-eminently in the sending of God’s Son to demonstrate in word and deed just how much God loves us, and now as the Spirit bears witness to God’s ongoing love for us and all creation.

And that love is so large that it MUST continue, so the analogy is that God is three-in-one, and also three-in-one PLUS one, that is you and me. God’s love works by growing, a love made complete in relationship in and through ALL of God’s children. And all it takes is one quick foray into the world beyond these doors, a glance at social media comments, a single awkward family gathering at cousin Susie’s wedding, some refusing to come at all, as she marries her longtime girlfriend, news accounts of our own government not only separating families at the border, but giving kids over to human traffickers because they didn’t do the work necessary to know exactly who it was they were handing these children over to…it is easy to see that living as if God’s love is made complete in our relationships to one another is NOT where we are.

But the Good News is that it IS where God is, and the God who we honor this morning, the God who we give thanks to for another day – even the really hot ones – is the God who is Creator and creating still, the God of our ancestors, wherever they came from, and the God who knits together our wonderful and broken, dysfunctional and sometimes even dangerous families – always offering a chance to be found in our relationships to one another.

Sometimes I think that the reason people have a hard time seeing the action of God in their lives is that they don’t take God’s promises seriously enough. What if you heard a story this morning of God’s expansive love, so large that all of humanityis wrapped up in it, made heirs to the kin-dom, part of the beloved community as if it were part of our DNA. If only those tests could reveal that you are Scottish or Spanish, Indian or Indonesian, Nigerian or Nicaraguan…AND…you are also human. Part of the family of God, created by and in love, filled with the Spirit and infused with God’s undiminishable Love without exceptions. How might we see the world if we believed that? What might we do? Who might we seek to include in the family? What would it even feel like to have that kind of awakening? Would it feel like being born again?

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Acts 1:15 -16 & 21-26

The sermon begins with gathering people willing to participate in a hands-on activity and having them draw straws from my hand. The “winner” gets to preach the sermon and the pastor sits down on the pew before calling the prank off to continue…

We’re in chapter one of the Book of Acts this morning and we find the disciples – only 15 verses in – already frustrated. Reeling from the whole resurrection thing, they are forced to contend with the realization that IF he were resurrected as he said, and he has been, then that must mean the other stuff he said was true, too. So, he’s back, but things have not turned out the way they thought they would. There is no magical transformation of the world, in fact, the message is the same message we struggle with now – wait. The promise of God’s justice and mercy is yet to come. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait…seems more like the DMV than the kin-dom of God.

And then there is this crisis of leadership. Who fills the void left by Judas? One might argue that there is no void. I mean, we’re not exactly looking for more of what Judas brought to the table, right? But we do still need that 12^thdisciple – kinda rounds out the set, you know? That way you can break into three groups of four or four groups of three, or partner up with six. Makes meetings go faster. Plus Judas kept the books, which can be the hardest position to replace.

The text says that there’s about 120 Jesus followers at this time and when they decide to replace Judas, they nominate two –Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus, and Matthias. I wonder how that all went down? Did they start an elaborate bureaucratic process where Joseph Barsabbas and Matthias submitted their resumes and had a series of interviews and deep discernment so they could finally submit them to an ecclesiastical council and thenthey could apply for the job? Or were Joseph and Matthias late to the meeting? Did they walk in about 10 minutes after the gavel and Peter and John go, “Hey, guess what guys? We went ahead and volunteered you for the vacancy.” Did they have a chance to walk away, to choose a different path, to ignore this call of the Spirit moving them into uncharted territory?

This is perhaps the relevant part of this text for us, for who are we if not the next in line to be apostles? Who are we if not here to help lead the church into a new world, on new ground, with a new vision from a God who has written a comma into our lives, not a period? There was no guidebook for the early church. As hard as that is to imagine for us with our Constitution, by-laws, and policies and procedures, the reality is that they were making it up as they went along…and this is not only accepted, it is part of our holy scripture. Even those notchosen, the ones who didn’tget the short straw, still had a part to play. Were they not still disciples, still followers of Jesus? We may not know their names, but that doesn’t matter. The willingness to hear the Spirit’s call and to follow is what matters, for more often than not God uses our everyday lives, not the extraordinary ones, for God’s work. If we can learn to listen…

Our spiritual history tells us that we stumble our way into the path that God has in mind for us. It is more improvisational than planned, for we are often faced with a hand stuffed with straws and we either get the long one, or we sometimes don’t choose at all. That only means we’re available for the next thing the Spirit has in mind, if we will keep listening. But I have some tough news. Hearing the Spirit isn’t easy. We don’t speak “spirit-ease”, at least most of us don’t. Working with the Holy Spirit is like having the best map right in front of you, but it’s in ancient sanskrit and you can’t read a bit of it.

We must learnto hear from and trust the voice of the Holy Spirit, to help each other discern Her voice, for the challenging part of our Bible-centric way of doing church is that the Bible cannot cover all the situations we encounter. We don’t, for instance, have a specific Bible verse that tell us exactly how to approach a bill from the legislature that would make it legal for adoption agencies to discriminate on the basis of “religious conviction” and still receive state funds. That bill, as many of you know, was just signed by the Governor. We have passages that some people use to judge the LGBTQ community, and some passages that tell us how we are to respond to sin amongst us – hint, it isn’t by denying people families. We have passages that tell us about the directive of love and passages that are super, super judgey and mean. But none that say, if thisprecise issue comes up, do that. We have to discern. We have to weigh all of the passages we see and make a decision about who we think God is and where we think God would have us go.

The Book of Acts, and the whole of scripture, is full of these “short straw” moments, where we are being asked to step into something new, to do something we feel unprepared for, to understand that we worship a “still-speaking God” who is not bound by what God has done in the past, nor trapped by our ability to perceive what God is doing. Where, we ought to ask ourselves often, is God placing us now in the ongoing story of the Jesus movement? Where are we being guided, at a time when “religious practice” and “individual freedom” get used to justify all kinds of mean-spirited and even evil actions? Where is God’s hand being set out for us, straws in place, at a time when being “Christian” seems to mean we focus on a few passages about specific sins and ignore the vast collection of commands that we care for the widow and orphan, even if it raises our taxes, that we shelter the weak, even if we must give up some of our strength, that we welcome the stranger, even if that is uncomfortable or inconvenient, or requires us to learn a little Spanish? Hearing the voice of the Spirit is hard, particularly when She is drowned out by the cacophony of 24-hour news, social media posts, the constant defense of our position and the endless noise of entertainment. It all shapes our hearts in feedback loops that don’t bring us closer to God.

There is no road map for this thing called life. We may want it to be neatly organized or predictable, or fair and just. We may seek in it a purity that we will never find. We may seek to get through it without getting the short straw, but you know what? That short straw- that directive to do the thing you don’t want to do, to take the step you don’t want to take, to labor in the way you don’t want to labor – that might just be the voice of the Spirit speaking directly to you, asking you to choose boldly, knowing that there is nothing you can do that with separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Nothing. The Spirit is here ready to move forward with us into a new future, with all our imperfections, standing beside us with our broken parts, beckoning to us as we drift off the map with a holy GPS…recalculating, recalculating…

The world needs your voice – YOUR voice – so make time to listen to the call of the Holy Spirit and then say, send me, use me, fill me.

Pick a straw. The Spirit is calling.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Acts 10:44-48

In a fascinating episode of RadioLab on NPR, an academic who studies ancient texts found a real issue in two very influential books – The Iliad and the Odyssey. As a very descriptive writer, Homer often gives great details, clearly observational and particular. But when he looked carefully at these texts, the academic noticed that the way Homer used color is odd. Black and white seem pretty typical, but he describes the metal iron as violet, as he does sheep. He describes the sea as “wine colored”, which could be just poetic, but he also describes oxen as wine-colored as well. He describes both honey and what he calls “faces tight with fear” as green. He uses black and white hundreds of times, but red only about 13 times in both books, yellow and green under 10 times. And he never uses the color blue. Never.

Other classic Greek texts also use colors in strange ways and also never use the color blue. Never. The academic’s conclusion was that Homer was colorblind…and so was every other Greek person, which seems ridiculous. So what else might have been happening here? Another academic, some time later, looks at the same research and then expands it beyond to other cultures where she finds, in ancient Vedic hymns and Icelandic tales, even in our original Hebrew texts from the Bible – no blue. There are descriptions of the heavens, massive clouds, fiery chariots, the vast expanse of the sky and…no blue. The sky isn’t blue.

Enter a social psychologist decades later. Studying a tribe in Namibia who have no word for blue, he showed them pictures of several squares – mostly green except for one, which was blue. The tribe stared at the screen, unable to declare a distinction. How did he explain this? When we make a category for something, when we name it, it creates a feedback loop. It is a difficult thing to understand, but the claim is that without the word “blue” you don’t notice the blue. Having a name makes it real. In other words, experience really, really shapes our world.

I know what you might be thinking – but what about the sky? It’s blue. Of course, science tells us that the sky really isn’t blue – there’s light refraction, and the color blue travels in smaller, shorter waves so we see it in the expanse of the sky more readily. But we all describe it as blue, so consistently so that we use it as the penultimate example of fact – next thing you know, he’ll tell you the sky isn’t blue. So, the psychologist happens to be teaching his young daughter colors at the time and he tries an experiment. He teaches her all the colors, including blue, but never teaches her that the sky is blue. Finally after she shows that she knows all her colors, he points to the sky and asks, “What color is that?” She freezes. She has no answer, as if he is asking her to describe a great void. After weeks of this question, she finally acquiesces to say “white”, but even that isn’t consistent. Only after many months does she begin to condition herself to think that the sky is, in fact, blue.

It’s not, the researchers are quick to say, that blue doesn’t exist until we name it, or that we don’t see it until we know what to call it. It’s more, the social psychologist says, like the volume is turned down very low on blue until we have a category for it…until we have space in our awareness…and then the volume slowly increases.

The Book of Acts is full of scenes where the volume is being turned up. The Holy Spirit visits Peter three times on a rooftop to tell him that his definitions of “clean” and “unclean” are his – not God’s. Saul has such a transformative encounter with the risen Christ that he changes his name and his entire life, becoming the apostle Paul, preaching that there is no Gentile or Jew, no slave nor free, no male or female in Christ. Philip encounters an Ethiopian eunuch. A member of another tribe and race. A gender non-conforming person. A queer person. And Philip struggles to understand how to be faithful when the amazing grace of God demands that he set aside his prejudices and listen to someone, even welcome and embrace them. So he has to develop a new category – and give this eunuch the name they are asking for – beloved child of God.
So he baptizes the eunuch. All of these encounters turn up the volume on a new world, changing for each disciple what is possible with God.

As they realize the presence of Jesus post-Easter, and feel the annoying deliberateness of the Spirit, the disciples have to do some backtracking – like when you are raising kids and suddenly you realize how right your parents were, and you have to scramble to remember all the things they said. Now what was it Jesus said about loving your enemy? Do you remember what he said to the crowd gathered to stone the woman caught in adultery, or what he told us after he met in the broad daylight with the foreign woman from another religion? What did he teach us about love?

The Book of Acts is an adventure for the disciples in turning up the volume and saying to people around them that the sky isn’t blue. It is marked by the arrival of the Holy Spirit, here to guide the church in its development, or to pester us into compliance with grace, whatever is needed. So what does it say to us now, as the church, that these stories of our beginnings are wrapped in the movement of a Holy Spirit that re-defines the norms, demands the welcome of people once rejected, and challenges the categories of clean and unclean so carefully crafted by religious tradition? This “Holy Spirit” even works against scripture, openly defying the “law” with this ridiculous notion of God’s love for all people.

As the church struggles with the rights and welcome of LGBTQ persons, as our state once again tries to legislate a particular “morality”, as we debate guns and violence and whether or not what happens to your kid impacts my kid…as we move into Mental Health awareness month and what we are aware of is the vast chasm between our understanding of mental health needs and the resources available…we need the Holy Spirit. The volume needs to be turned up – not so we can find something that has never existed, but so we can hear it, so we can experience the life of an LGBTQ person seeking to claim themselves in a world that insists on narrower definitions and have that shape our attitudes, or the reality of a person seeking mental health wellness with little support or even acknowledgement, so it might guide our decisions. For when we allow for re-naming to occur, we we can hear someone loud enough to let their voice change us, we practice grace and hospitality. When we take the chance to do exactly what Jesus taught us, to love instead of arguing over the rules, to extend grace instead of deciding who is the worst sinner, to bring peace to the table when it is set for revenge, we discover the newness that God has ready for us each and every day – if we will open our hearts to receive it.

It is only when the disciples began to practice the same kind of love that Jesus practiced that their vision expanded. As they worried less about categorizing and judging people and simply tried to love them as Jesus would have this amazing thing happened. They began to allow that perhaps God didn’t see the world the way they did, they started to make some new categories and to see things they couldn’t see before.

What places in our lives do we have the volume turned down so low on that we can’t even hear it? Where do we lack even categories, maybe because of ignorance, maybe because of intentionality, maybe because of prejudice? What are you clinging to because it’s the way you have always done it, or because you don’t know another way? Where have you decided that you know someone, that you’ve got them all figured out, because of their label, or a single action? Who is speaking a new name to you? And who’s volume do you have down so low that you can’t hear it? Is it possible that the Spirit is whispering in your ear…there’s another shade, another tint, another color…could it be the change you seek isn’t found in looking at the same places, or in finding something in which you can be certain, but rather in having the courage to not know and to move ahead anyway, trusting in God’s love and seeking the newness that God is placing before you?

The Spirit is calling to each of us today – in the songs of the early morning birds and the cries of victims of injustice…in the hopes of people who gather each morning at 6am to find another day without drugging themselves into numbness, the dedication of an immigrant seeking refuge and opportunity despite the laws, and the resilience of people who do what they can, where they are, with what they have, though they really want to crawl into bed. The Spirit is calling us to look out at the world around us and to see it with God’s eyes, in the full spectrum, with possibilities as endless as creation itself.

Open our eyes, O God, to see what you have already placed before us…

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

1 John 4:7-21

I think it’s been awhile since we’ve had a confirmation class at Fellowship, maybe long enough that we don’t all quite remember what they are about. Come to think of it, what ARE they all about? I think that may have been a question our teenagers had as their parents volun-told them that they’d been going to almost 5 months worth of sitting in a room talking with old people about God. What confirmation is really about is imparting a tradition, or connecting to an institution, which, I grant you, may be even less popular these days than the “talking with old people about God” scenario. Yet this tradition, Christianity, ponders with us across almost the entire history of humanity the meaning of life and how it is that we fit into the creation we see all around us. And it’s answer

comes back again and again to this word – love.

I watch my own children, and the children of many others, grow up wrestling with this word. And listen, middle and high school are among the most difficult places to get a good sense of what love ought to mean. Typical teenage angst mixed with walkouts and mass shootings, and adults that do a poor job of teaching by example might make us wonder – why talk of love at a time like this? Yet we long for love. We search high and low for it, thinking it is romance, engaging in all kinds of unhealthy behaviors just for a taste of what we think love is, hoping that some other person will fix us, or that we can fix them. We base our self-worth on the number of likes we get and we live our days snapping pics of our minute-to-minute movement in the hopes that will count as connection in a world that, despite our technology, seems more disconnected than ever.

Words from our tradition remind us of something this morning, my friends. This author we call John says it clearly. Love isn’t enough. After all, you can love your shoes. Is that what we’re talking about? You can love lots of things – biscuits and gravy, a summer day, napping in the warm sun, the Thunder, licorice, that cute person in third hour, money, power, guns…the list goes on and on. Is that the kind of love that John is talking about here? Is that the kind of love that we talk about when we say that “God is love?” And where, one might ask, do we learn of the kind of love John speaks of here, using Greek the word agape? Do we learn what love is from watching sappy movies, or royal weddings? Do we see it in a marriage that has lasted a long time or a mother nursing her baby? Or is it that favorite food, that special team, or a fat bank account?

Is that the kind of love that IS God?

Confirmation provides a space for our teens to ask themselves some of these questions, not so they can make the “right” choice or conformto a set of rules or obligations, but so they might find where they fit into the experiences that lie before us, present in the long history – warts and all – of the church of Jesus Christ…to conFIRM their place in that tradition. Learning that history, seeing the doctrine that has developed over the centuries, hearing of the lives of people who have struggled to understand their faith and live it out helps us all to discern the difference between doctrine and God, between tradition and divinity, between our words aboutGod and the God in which we trust but never fully know.

In the United Church of Christ, we are not founded on dogma, doctrine or creed. So, when you ask us what we believe, the answer gets tricky. WE probably believe very little together – a Creator modeled to us in the person of Jesus, the importance of church, a God who is about love, love with justice, love with liberation. Beyond that we begin to break down into different camps. And what we’ve discovered is that’s OK. It’s messy sometimes, but it’s OK. Precisely because of what John says in this passage – because “God is love, and those who remain in love remain in God and God remains in them.”

And love, I think we’d all agree, must be more than words…love comes with what we do, not what we say. It comes with our experience, not our knowledge.

I have to tell a story about Alec now…and it’s a story that he has given me permission to tell. Just a couple of weeks ago, he was recounting being back in Sunday school with JD and being asked to recite a Bible passage. When he said he didn’t remember any, JD was like – “C’mon, you’ve been in Sunday school your whole life, surely you remember one!” Alec responded, at least this is what he told me, “Yeah, but they never taught me all the stuff that Jesus said, they taught me what Jesus did.”

That is really what confirmation class is all about. Here’s the history. Here are the stories. Here is what the tradition tells us about how Christians say, in a myriad of different ways, some far more legit than others, that “God is love.” And that love is not the same as how you feel about something, it is what you do…how you treat yourself and others. It is love that is willing to give something up for it’s sake…a love that costs something. That is the love that we call God. And not only we, but the tradition, too. We’ll teach you some of what Jesus said, and show you what he did. Now, what are you going to do about it?

Theirconfirmation, church, is really a ride along for the rest of us. We get to vicariously ask ourselves the same questions, for these are the operative questions of our lives of faith. What does it mean to be Christian if we do not learn how to love better? What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus if our capacity to love our neighbor, instead of hating, fearing or ignoring them, does not increase? What does it mean to say that we belong to the church of Jesus Christ if such belonging works on us the way that John warns us about?

“If anyonesays, I love God, and hates a brother or sister, he is a liar,

because the person who doesn’t love a brother or sister who can be seen

can’t love God, who can’t be seen?

We live in a mean world. And we are raising children in a mean world. It is a world that teaches fear and hatred, violence and aggression and if we offer nothing else to counter that message, then we will be left to the consequences of such lack. We know what our children face on a daily basis, what they are exposed to and what lessons they could learn from such dehumanizing action that happens all around them. When we take them through confirmation class we are, in part, reminding them – an ourselves at the same time – that we belong to a tradition not unscarred by such evil and ugliness, not immune to the same fear and hatred, but a tradition that still holds up the dream of God’s kin-dom, a place where all people know that they are children of God, beloved by God and accepted by that which that is bigger than all of us, that which lies at the heart of a dying star and the pulse of a baby’s birth, that which resides in each of us, lifting us up and making us whole. We call that God. Our tradition calls that God. And our faith calls on us from across the centuries to work out our salvation, as Paul wrote, with awe and trembling, by being love in the world.

So we learn what Jesus did. And we listen to what Jesus taught. We decide to follow Jesus, to let our light shine, to stand against a world of bitterness and isolation and build a house where all are welcome. We try and grow our love, to reach for something bigger, to love like a neighbor if we must, and like God if we can, to make love an intuitive reaction, instead of the bigotry and labeling that has been placed in all of our hearts. We can endeavor together to belove in the world…to do what we can, where we are, with what we have…teaching a Gospel that fears less and welcomes more, judges less and trusts more, despairs less and hopes more…hates less and loves more, showing God’s great love for us all – every single other – to the world.

This is the Gospel truth. If we know this…if we can confirmit…it will set us free.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

John 10:11-16

I tried really hard to think of a shepherd story for the beginning of this sermon, you know one that would give a modern take on this ancient story, but we don’t really have shepherd stories anymore. Maybe it’s because we don’t have shepherds. I mean raise your hand if you know a shepherd, like personally know someone who spend their days shepherding. Ranchers don’t count, and there’s a reason for that. Shepherds aren’t ranchers. Ranchers stay put. Historically speaking, shepherds move their flocks around, sort-of free grazing on the land of other people. So it might surprise you to find out, especially given the number of positive images of Jesus as a shepherd, that shepherds are not thought of highly in the cultures where they have existed or still exist today.

There are shepherds in Palestine to this day, mostly Arabic-speaking and nomadic. In Jesus’ time, shepherds were on the lower rung of the Judean social ladder, like butchers and tanners, since they came into potential contact with all kinds of unclean things and since their herds often trampled and ruined any crops. They were tolerated in Jesus’ time, necessary but not embraced at all, kind of like used car salesmen or Congress. So add this to the list of things that Jesus uses as spiritual metaphors which are unclean, or questionable, to his culture. A mustard seed? Well, that’s a weed. A ‘pinch’ of leaven? Leaven is so questionable that you avoid it during the holiest holidays. Jesus touches the lepers, eats with the tax collectors and the prostitutes, and uses an encounter with a foreign woman of questionable character to emphasize the action of God, all of whom belonged to that same class of despised people that shepherds did, a class often labeled “sinners.” So, why not a shepherd, too?

In one of the many “I Am” statements from John’s Gospel, Jesus not only says he’s a shepherd, but a GOOD shepherd. Not like those othershepherds. Which sounds again like a used car salesman’s line as you step on the lot. But I think what Jesus is doing here, or rather John on Jesus’ behalf, is taking this common image and asking us to look at it again. After all, what does a shepherd do? A shepherd cares for the flock, tending to the wounded, keeping them safe from predators and moving through the seasons of life – birth, growth, change, stress, success, failure and, finally death. It is a necessary role for a sheep, someone to guide them and protect them. And while we may not much care for the metaphor when we realize that we are the sheep in this scenario, it does allow us to think about how it is that Jesus guides, protects and shapes us, which is a necessary function. And in his day and age, the metaphor would have asked people to take this tolerated work, see the good in it, and attach it to what Jesus was doing.

Maybe that’s why the modifier “good” is there. That word in Greek,kalos, means noble, beautiful, good…an outward indication of an inner character. So Jesus, through John, is even being inclusive with this metaphor. There can be such a thing as a goodshepherd…like there can be a good lawyer, or a good cop, or a good President.

It is possible, if that person has character and heart.

Maybe that’s why Jesus also uses this image of a hired hand alongside the shepherd, someone who is supposed to do those crucial things, but who’s not really invested in it, as a way of talking about the various kinds of things or people that we have leading the way. They’re not all the best leaders. We have “hired hands” all around us, supposedly as protection, presumably to do the necessary work of the shepherd, only they don’t. These hired hands don’t do the hard work of nurturing the flock, of caring and suffering with us. Instead they say that what will guide and protect us is acquisition…more money, more possessions, more youth, more cars, more food, more sex, more Facebook friends, more guns, more and more and more. Because these cultural “hired hands” don’t really care about us, they sell us the lie that we are insufficient, that we are not good enough, that we are not worthy, in fact, of love and respect and happiness without some product, some ideology, some weapon, something – almost anything else – beyond who we are and how God created us. They sell us that lie as if it wereprotection, or nurture, or growth. The good shepherd, in John’s metaphorical imagination, cares for us because we exist…because we are children of God, beloved by God and accepted by God.

This morning the word I have for you is that we doneed a shepherd, we need a good shepherd who cares so much for the sheep that a single lost one is worthy of attention. As much as I don’t care to think of myself as a sheep, I will be the first to admit that I don’t know where I’m going, even though I have goals, and I don’t know how to get there, even though I have plans. I am, in a metaphorical sense, wandering around, in need of guidance. In fact, I think we all are to varying degrees. And the lesson from John reminds me this morning that there is a shepherd for us, and it isn’t the 24-hour news channel, the latest social media post, or the free-market. It isn’t even, as hard as it is for me to say, National Public Radio (sorry, Rich) and it isn’t the New York Times. It’s not our favorite pop star, the greatest actor of our generation, any of a number of fearless, activist leaders nor anyelected official. And it isn’t your pastor. It’s Jesus.

Jesus, the good shepherd, believes in us all – every single other – as valuable and worthy. Jesus guides us to give up the false protection of certainty, of blame, denial and accusation, of acquisition and competition to support each other in embracing vulnerability, courage, and what author and researcher Dr. Brene Brown calls, “whole-hearted living.” For when we fall prey to the predator called “winning,” the sharp teeth of celebrity, fame or consumption, the tearing claws of shame and fear, we give up the realprotection that Jesus offers, the security of trust and vulnerability that is found in following a shepherd whose power is made perfect in weakness, as Paul wrote to his churches.

It is our shepherd, Jesus, who points us to a God whose love is far stronger than what we count as strength, whose grace is far more life-giving than any amount of righteousness we thinkwe could earn and whose compassion is far more restorative than any judgment to which we still cling, hoping that some kind of plastic “righteousness” can save us, at the cost of others. The goodshepherd, Jesus, guides us to the most important thing that we “sheep” could have in our search for meaning and hope, and it isn’t food or shelter, not security or shade, though those things are important. It is connection. It is value. It is our inherent worth as human beings, created by a God who knows all about us, our every supposed weakness, our oh-so polished strengths, a God who knows our every detail, and loves us without measure, because we are worthy…we belong.

God lets us lie down in green meadows,

God leads us by restful waters and refreshes our soul…

God will stay with us and guide our path…

She is with us all,

so that we might work for goodness and mercy

and share the bounty of the earth together.

May it be so. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Luke 24:13-36

Before we look at this post-Easter story, I want to remind us all of a pre-Easter story. Let’s go back to the Sea of Galilee, way back in chapter 8 of Luke’s Gospel. There we find the disciples and Jesus on a boat headed out into the waves, when a storm comes up and everyone is terrified. They wake an exhausted Jesus up, who is sleeping through the whole thing, and he says, “Have you no faith at all?” In Mark’s gospel, he calms the storm by saying, “Be quiet!”, which is sometimes translated as him shouting to the clouds, “Peace!” and everything gets still. It’s what we often think peace is, especially those of us who have kids, though the word in Greek in that calming the sea section of Mark is the word for “quiet” or “stillness”, and not the word eirene (ear-eh-ne), which is the word for peace. Translators have just taken some liberty with the word usage, perhaps because for a long time, we have thought that peace means calm, or the lack of conflict, or passiveness. But this is not the peace that Jesus leaves with us.

Many of us have been longing for a little quiet, a little stillness so we can rest after a long two weeks of perpetual outrage and moral indignation, which is NOT is short supply these days. The teacher walkout is over. Only it’s not. The unions may have called it off, the districts may have called it off, but the teachers, I’m telling you right now, have not called it off…and they’re the ones who called it on in the first place. The teachers I talk to aren’t really sure what they’re going to do now but I suspect this will be a very interesting week to come, as frustration and anger find new targets and we find out just how destructive and divisive a good rally can become.

I’ve been reminded a lot recently in this time of resistance and organization, and lack of organized resistance, of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – particularly near the 50th anniversary of his assassination. I think it’s important for us to remember the details of the last portion of his life. King had come to Memphis not for voting rights, but for the rights of sanitation workers to receive living wages, to strike if the need was there and to speak out against a system that was dependent on their work but kept them powerless and poor…just like slavery. He gave a now famous speech to the gathered workers, where he says, “I have looked down from the mountain and I have seen the promised land…” before the haunting line, a harbinger of the next morning, “I may not get there with you.” That is seared into our memories. But before that speech, there was a march. It was a march of sanitation workers into downtown Memphis that exploded into violence and chaos, causing Dr. King and his allies to flee the march and damaging his claim of non-violent protest as well as his dedication to the cause. But he returned. He came back to Memphis because he had seen the promised land, and it was a land where what happens to you, happens to me…where we are interconnected…tied together, as he wrote, in a single garment of destiny.

Dr. King meant something else by peace, too. He meant peace as a way of life, rooted in the practice of non-violence, and he had to spend a lot of time explaining the tactics of that non-violence, both to his own people and to the world outside that circle. Non-violent resistance asserts, first and foremost, that one can resist evil without resorting to violence. It seeks understanding and opposes evil itself, rather than scapegoating the person committing the evil act. It believes that suffering itself can be redemptive, so it does not turn away from sacrificial work. While it most certainly avoids physical violence, it also avoids the internal violence of spirit, resisting the urge to hate those who hate, for instance. And nonviolent resistance, in the way that Dr. King practiced it, must have a “deep faith in the future,” stemming from the conviction that “the universe is on the side of justice”.

This is a mighty task on the best of days, made infinitely more difficult when the chips are down and the feelings of disappointment and dissatisfaction rule the day. This is the challenge of the next few weeks, to reshape a walkout into a movement, to find the energy and drive to move past the moment and continue to ask ourselves, after victory or defeat, what now?

This is precisely where the disciples found themselves on the road to Emmaus, broken and distraught over the murder of Jesus, they talk. The text says, “about all the things that had happened”, but we don’t really know what that means. They had heard the news of the tomb, but what details did they have? Facebook would have come in really handy for them – snap a selfie next to the rolled away stone and list the details…#he’sback. But, alas, that’s not how it worked then. So they were left to wonder as they wandered, talking to this “stranger”, amazed at how uninformed he is.

The “what now” of the situation is pretty lost on them, other than to get to the next town and regroup. When the hidden Jesus explains everything to them, they don’t get it. When he details the scriptural connections, emphasizes to them how “slow of heart” they are, they don’t budge. It is not until they stop for the night and, seeing that he plans to walk on alone into the darkness, they welcome him in, they share their food, they are hospitable, engaging in some basic humanity to this stranger….and when the bread is broken, then they recognize Jesus…and he vanishes.

Only they did recognize something they now realize. Their hearts were burning, they recall, as he spoke to them about the connections, as he explained things to them. I don’t really know what that means – their hearts were burning. Maybe some Tums would help? Or maybe it is something more like the feeling I’ve had over the past couple of weeks as I witnessed strangers linking arms and chanting for support, as I’ve seen and helped my colleagues trying hard to make their church a stand-in for all that TPS does on a daily basis, as I’ve stood with teachers who all know what it means to care for other people’s kids as if they were their own. In those moments we really knew what it meant to be together, how community ought to work. Maybe that’s what the disciples were feeling, like the words of their rabbi were actually real, and they could trust in them even when it looked like failure…that there will still another chapter to come, even after Rome thought they had eliminated the problem.

This is what I think some people in power have in mind now. The walkout is over. Therefore that little effort is dead. Back to business as usual. Only they had 600 people file to run for office – a record. And the conversations are still happening. And parents and students and, yes, even some teachers will still be at the Capitol on Monday morning. And we know what community looks and sounds and feels like, we know what it is like to have a table where we pull up extra chairs and we’re not going back to business as usual.

The disciples regroup with the others as our story continues, and they recount this experience with the risen Christ, all of whom have had similar encounters. And suddenly Jesus appears among them and says – Peace be with you. It is the single most repeated phrase from the resurrected Christ. Peace be with you. And though he comes each time with the greeting of peace, it is not quiet or stillness that he offers. The word, in Greek is eirene, which comes from the root verb eiro, meaning to join or bind together that which has been separated. The peace of the risen Christ is the ability to bind together that which has been separated. It stands in direct contrast to a violence which, as Dr. King wrote, “is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all.” It is not simply the absence of war, as the Greek implies, but rather more like the Hebrew shalom that Jesus almost certainly had in mind when he gave this greeting…a shalom that comes from being in right relationship with God and one another.

So when the risen Christ says, “Peace be with you”, it is not a state of blessed euphoria or the granting of happiness, prosperity and personal well being. No, it is his peace that he leaves with them, a peace that Jesus taught them was based in trust and hope and the active living of it – there is no way to peace, peace is the way. This is not a statement of passivity or retirement into apathy. No, when we as Christians, as followers of the risen Christ say, “peace is the way”, just as surely as when we say, “peace be with you”, we ought to mean what Jesus meant – we are inviting one another to a new reality, a way to be in the world, and it isn’t everyone for themselves. It is the way of community, the way of shalom – of right relationship with God and one another, the way that gathers together what has been separated and seeks to create systems and laws with the same goal. This is why I say that when we, as Christians, seek things to support in the world, we could scarcely find better things than public education and a strong social safety net. We seek these things not as partisan platform, but because we believe that this is what leads us to wholeness, this kind of common good and love for neighbor is part of the abundant life that Jesus has promised…the peace he leaves with us.

I can tell you that we have some foundation already, some leverage for our own hearts in the memories of the past days, where a community came together to respond to one another’s needs…where perfect strangers looked after one another’s children and we filled tables with food and drink for anyone who would come to the table. It was a secular metaphor for our Christian metaphor – the table where all are welcome for no other reason than they are a human being. And I’ll tell you, I wasn’t sure that still existed out there in the numbers that I saw over the past two weeks. A BIG takeaway for me, one that helps soften the blow of an uncooperative legislature, is that we gathered…we set a table for one another…we bound together people who have felt separated, me included, and we felt our numbers and saw that what we hold in our own hearts, something we thought was “just us”, or maybe “just my church”, could actually be bigger than we imagined.

In these times of great turmoil and separation we must remember to take every chance to gather together, to come to the various tables around which we live. For we all know that there are things separated which must be bound back together…like our social fabric, our sense of common good, like our commitment to the simple and radical idea that either all of us matter or none of us do. For Christ will not be known to us in the loudest praise, or in the correctness of our theology. Christ will not be known to us in our righteous anger or our vengeful retaliation, no matter how justified. Christ will be known to us in the breaking of the bread…in the invitation…in the hope of a table set for everyone, where either all of us matter or none of us do. That’s when we’ll recognize Christ…who’s been standing beside us the whole time.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

John 20:19-29

So we pick up our story – you remember, the story from last week…little thing we call Easter? Well, in our scripture, it’s still the same day, just later in the evening. The disciples aren’t quite dancing in the streets with the news of the return of Jesus. In fact, they’re cowering in an upstairs room, an undisclosed location, as they say. Jesus comes to them and says – peace be with you. And this was before they learned to say – and also with you. But first he shows them his hands and side, the text says. THEN we get the story of “doubting Thomas”, who has become sort of the poster child for faithless skepticism. But wait, Jesus shows the other disciples his hands and side, too, at least according to John’s version of the story. Yet they seem to expect Thomas to believe without seeing what they got to see. There’s plenty of doubt to go around in this story, no need to hang it all on Thomas, and before we disparage doubt, let’s give it a chance.

The title of the sermon in your bulletin will NOT match what you hear this morning. Perhaps it’s better that you title this “the Miracle of Doubt” in your heads because I, like lots of my colleagues, scrapped what I had planned earlier in the week as I rushed around between here and the Capitol and various sites along the route the walkers are taking between Tulsa and OKC, always encountering the inspiring vision of teachers who have had enough. Enough of the inattention, enough of the lack of support, enough of the words with no corresponding action. Despite the promises of the legislature, they have their doubts.

So, let’s talk a little about doubt. We have a lot of it around right now. We have parents who doubt they can figure out another thing for their kids to do with another day off school. We have seniors who doubt they can get the instruction needed to pass their exams and graduate. And we have a group of legislators who continue to make the mistake of doubting the resolve of people who teach kindergartners all day, endure the eye-rolls and heavy sighs of teenagers and keep 6th graders engaged on shoestring budgets and no bathroom breaks. And all of us, I suspect, at least have moments of doubt that we can ever resolve all of the things that seem so wrong, so broken, so battered. Doubt is real. And, God knows, it is around us all the time.

But doubt is not necessarily a bad thing at all. In fact, it is a necessary part of our faith lives. After all, if we are certain about something, there’s really not much need for faith, is there? Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance in what we do not see, the writer of the Book of Hebrews tells us. It is not knowing something for certain, but trusting in something that often is not even visible to us at the time. Faith is, in one way of looking at it, confidence in the things we aren’t certain about, or deep trust in profound doubt. This is, of course, a balancing act – too much doubt can lead to cynicism, which paralyzes us, making us unhelpful to any cause for change. Too little doubt and we face the dangers of certainty, which often leads to a false sense of righteousness that is never healthy.

When we embrace a healthy sense of doubt, we allow ourselves to move beyond the overly simplistic. Doubt asks us to check our facts again, to consider another point of view and to approach things with some humility. A good, balanced sense of doubt can actually help us navigate the tricky waters of an increasingly pluralistic, diverse and often chaotic world in the 21st century. Doubt helps encourage us to seek new information and new experiences, lest we get trapped in a single story. People who live in such bubbles only get exposed to what they already know where a healthy sense of doubt gets weakened by what is a false sense of security, generated by unchallenged stories and untested assertions. Our echo chambers, safely free from doubt, don’t develop in us the sense that something beyond our own experience might also be valid. Then it is our habits, our values, our identity, culture, food, music – that gets stamped as the default. Everything else is abnormal.

This assumption, you might notice, is being challenged mightily right now, which is part of what lies at the roots of the cultural angst in which we are living. People who live in those bubbles, whose cultural norms and identities have been the default setting for so long don’t like this change. And who can blame them? It fills one with great doubt when such foundational things are threatened. And when doubt is an unfamiliar feeling you think it dangerous, when it is, in fact, quite a healthy place to be.

See, I don’t blame Thomas at all. Having just had all of his dreams shattered, his vision of a messiah come to save them lashed to a tree and murdered just like all the other ones, his glorious vision of magic resolution to suffering not only unrealized, but heaped upon with even more suffering. Of course he wants to see the wounds. Doubt has been his companion for a long time. It is, after all, the disciples whom Jesus often has the hardest time convincing. They retreat into bickering, the fall asleep when he asks them to watch, they don’t understand the parables, they abandon Jesus at the first opportunity – though they have left their lives behind to follow him, they doubt.

I have to be honest with you. I don’t know how this walkout ends. People have been asking me that all week long and I don’t know if anyone knows how this walkout ends, and we certainly don’t know when. In many powerful ways this is beyond a single event – a walkout – and has become a movement. And there have been and will be great moments of doubt about it’s effectiveness, it’s orchestration, even it’s validity. I’m sure we have all wondered, especially our teachers, if the high cost that is in place for students, parents, guardians and the downstream workers in our school systems is worth all of this. We doubt whether our legislature will act effectively, or at all. I, at times, wonder if enough legislators even care about public education in the first place, that’s how cynical I can get. But I also know this. That doubt has to birth some vision of the future. We have to be able to imagine what happens after this single thing – after the walkout, whether educators get everything they want or just some of what they want. What is next for this movement?

For regardless of what happens with education in our state, we all know where we stand right now. Yes, near the bottom in per-pupil spending for years, and no raises for state employees or teachers in a decade, but also amongst the highest incarceration rates in the nation, some of the worst health rankings in the country, second in teen birth rates, tenth in rates of suicide, and 22% of our kids living below the poverty line. All of this at a time when racism, bigotry, xenophobia, sexism and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and actions have increased, mass shootings keep happening, ICE raids are no longer just going after the so-called “bad guys”, but deporting anyone they can get their hands on, and public outrage makes it feel like things are going to explode. Is it any wonder that we have some doubt? I want God to show up. I want to see the wounds, too, to touch the side, to know that the promise is more than just an idea. Sometimes faith is like that…a shot in the dark, a trust fall, sometimes it is just like Dr. King once said, “taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

I stood on the steps of Webster High School Wednesday morning, in the cold air with friends and colleagues to send a group of teachers, parents, students and supporters off on a 110 mile journey from Tulsa to the Capitol building in Oklahoma City. They are walking. You’ve probably seen this in the media – they are being joined by our superintendent, Dr. Deborah Gist. Wednesday was also the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King in Memphis. I reminded the crowd gathered there that Dr. King fought for civil rights, but that alone was not what got him killed. He fought for racial justice, but that alone was not what got him killed either. It was when he began to draw some connections, to show some intersections between racism and poverty, human rights and a military industrial complex that the tide really turned. We must remember as we celebrate holidays in his name and post quotes on our social media sites that when he was shot dead in Memphis, he was commonly listed among the most hated people in the United States, unpopular for his years and years of advocacy and agitation. Righteousness, my friends, rarely comes with popularity and, we must also remember,
change does not come in a single event. It takes time and dedication and consistency.

When Jesus first comes to the disciples in John’s version, it isn’t just to prove something to them. It is not to assuage their doubt, even though he shows them his hands and side. It is to say to them – twice, in fact – peace be with you. And to give them a charge – “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.
If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
In other words, go do what I have done. Be like me in the world. Dedicate yourself to the Way I have taught you. Please note that his Spirit-breathed direction never says anything about making sure other people follow the rules, or being certain about your eternal life, or the golden rule as we seem to have it now – he who has the gold makes the rules. No, this is an initiation into a walk of life that offers no guarantees, trusts in grace rather than perfection and absolutely depends on trust that God is with us in all things, moving in us, growing with us and being an eternal source of creativity and light. And it is trusting in that path, even when we doubt it.

As we consider the holiness of doubt, this is why I want to take us back to Holy Week…but not to Easter, and not to Good Friday. No, I want to take us to Maundy Thursday and to the table where Jesus sat with his disciples and announced God’s purpose in the world – love and grace given away to people at a table where everyone is welcome. A table where we can’t figure out how things work, where we use this language of body and blood and it’s kind of weird when you stop to think about it. A table where the most important theological statement we might make right now, at this time, in this place, is that this table is open to everyone because that means that God is available to everyone and therefore human dignity and grace and compassion and our basic identity as children of God is available to everyone. As Christian historian Diana Butler Bass asks, why don’t we focus ourselves on that instead of the cross, which is Rome’s violent disruption of the Jesus plan?

“The cumulative narrative of the post-Easter stories,” Dr. Bass says, “is that of Jesus gathering with his friends and followers around tables. Jesus is continuing the Table story post-Easter, not re-enacting the cross.” And I offer you a metaphor this morning for this table. Public schools. This is the place in our society where teachers try to reach all the kids, even the ones we have doubts about…this is where we welcome everyone, saying to them in that action that we all matter. Teachers live with doubt all the time, the kind of doubt that allows faith to take over, directing us to places we can’t go if we guide ourselves only by data and evidence of past achievements. Teachers imagine for their kids a future. They dream, sometimes even dream on their students’ behalf, as the students learn to dream for themselves. The doubt helps fuel imagination for what isn’t there yet.

Maybe we ought to still learn something from our teachers – like the faithful example of starting to walk when you don’t really know what you’re getting yourself into. We watched last night as the teachers prepared to eat their dinner in the fellowship hall at First Christian in Chandler, a doctor tending to their feet, the limps as they made their way to the buffet line, the new chants they were sharing as they prepare for another day of rhythmic walking – “rain, snow earthquake, lightning, nothing can stop us from doing the right thing!!” Yet you could see it in their eyes. They don’t really know where this all goes, they doubt they will get all the things they need, they live with the uncertainty of the path forward, with a future they cannot see. And still they walk.

“Have you believed because you have seen me?
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Mark 16:1-8

This just in – breaking news! The state legislature has just restored full funding to the core services of government and set us on a bright & stable path! Of course you know what I’m going to say next – April Fools.

Easter comes at such a hard time this year. Not only is it on April Fools, and what does one do with that liturgically, but why put it at the end of Holy Week? Don’t they know us pastors are real tired? I find myself fretting every year over what to say in this very sermon and I rarely have the energy or creativity left after a Palm Sunday, a Maundy Thursday, and a Good Friday to give it the justice I think it deserves. And this year, even more so because I’ve spent a lot of extra time planning for, organizing with and debating over a planned teacher walkout. This year I am tired, not only physically and mentally tired, but soul tired from the mix of perpetual outrage and the onslaught of challenges that leave me feeling that I’m constantly trying to get a drink from a firehose.

The more I read this week, the more I listened to commentaries and wrestled with stories that would fit, and tried to prepare for this moment in the best way I could, the more I found myself thinking – why mess with this? Why do I feel like I need to work Easter to have Easter work? Why not just let it work? Its really rather arrogant, you know? To think that I can top Easter. I mean, how do you top resurrection? “Yeah, so there’s being raised from the dead and all that, but wait until you hear this sermon!”

Today is the bookend of our High Holy Days, Christmas on one side and Easter Sunday on the other – the whole life of Jesus in between, something we gloss over far too often in the mainstream theology of our time. We are surrounded by what a colleague of mine used to call “Airport Christianity”, only concerned with arrival and departure, no room for the life as we rush from birth to resurrection.

What Easter says to us, however, is that the life of Jesus matters. After all, we don’t acknowledge that someone was crucified, LOTS of people were crucified in Jesus’ time. What is important is that Jesus was crucified. And it’s not just resurrection that is critical, though being raised from the dead is, I grant you, rather special all by itself.
But for Christians it is that JESUS was raised from the dead. Jesus was lifted up, raised up the Greek says, as God’s great “YES” to the Jesus plan. God’s affirmation that the way of Jesus, rather than some role Jesus plays leads us from death to resurrection, so that Jesus ceases to be some magic talisman, and instead models for us in his life a trust in God that we can emulate. And when we have trust in God like Jesus had trust in God, then we too can participate in the kin-dom. It’s the meaning behind the Easter story – that the resurrection of Jesus would compel us to live lives of resurrection, to live as Easter people. No longer does death hold any sway on us, no longer will fear rule our decisions, no longer will we turn away from compassion, from hope, from trust – from the things that bring life, but can now live fully into hope and promise and that wonderful, beautiful story does the same thing for us that it does for the women at the tomb – it scares the crap out of us.

I mean, I’d much rather the story be that Jesus pays the price for our sins and I can just believe in him and move on with my life. If I have to believe like him…yikes…we just saw what happened to that guy! Even if great beauty is part of this equation, we’re still viscerally aware that it is life, death and resurrection…and it’s the death part that stops us in our tracks. Yet we need that transcendent story, the power of the “joy comes in the morning” assertion that enables us to make it through the brutality and suffering. It’s what makes Holy Week so difficult, because we have to be able to take the ugliness of the cross, the cruelty that we know lives in our own world in so many ways, and hold that in tension with the beauty of Easter morning and the amazement of an empty tomb. Being able to experience pain and loss and to still imagine love and hope is precisely what is critical to seeing Easter not as an event, but a way of living.

This is perhaps what happened for the disciples, not so much on Easter morning but in the days and weeks and years that followed as they began to live Easter and to understand the connections between a Jesus who was executed, sentenced to the death penalty by the religious & political elites because of his inauguration of the Kin-dom of God, and their own lives.

The Easter story from Mark ends very abruptly. In Greek, the final sentence of this passage literally reads, “and coming swiftly they fled from the tomb it had them trembling and amazing and to anyone nothing they said they feared for.” Part of that weirdness is because of how Greek sentence structure is different than ours, but it does end with a “for”, and even the Greeks don’t end their sentences with prepositions. The word gar in Greek is a conjunction…it’s like Mark wrote this to end mid sentence, like perhaps he means to suggest even down to the grammar that the story isn’t over. After all, if they had really fled and said nothing to anyone, we wouldn’t be here, would we? Mark’s assertion was so unsatisfying that we have three other versions of what happened Easter morning in the other gospels, AND there is also a so-called “longer ending” of Mark, another 12 verses that our earliest versions of Mark don’t contain this abrupt ending.

Maybe it means that the story is still going on, that resurrection wasn’t a one time deal, or Easter a single day on the calendar, running around between March and April.
Maybe it means that we are meant to live Easter, as Easter people, trusting in the cycle – life, death and resurrection. But that means expecting it and expecting it means looking for it and looking for it means that we have to know what resurrection looks like. And a story from 2000 years ago doesn’t always do the trick. Where can we see resurrection today? Perhaps we should consider a group of teenagers from Florida who have looked in the face of death, said, “No more!” and are marching their way into new territory, taking heat and breaking down barriers that we thought unbreakable. Or what about the continued efforts of people of color to stand and shout, “Black Lives Matter” in the face of overwhelming odds, a justice system that fails them again and again, and encounter after encounter with law enforcement that goes south, sometimes with 21 shots fired into a young man holding a cell phone, 7 of them in his back? Might we look closer to home? Like an impending teacher walkout – tomorrow, in fact – that is not just about salaries, which are woefully low, but clearly about whether or not we’re going to put our money where our mouth is, for there is not a single legislator who will publicly call for the degradation of teachers or the dismantling of public education. To which I reply, quoting James Baldwin, I want to believe what you say, but I see what you do.

Look, I know it’s cold and wet out there today, and that yesterday was this strange mix of sun and clouds, but the trees are budding, the flowers are blooming, the stinky Bradford Pears are stinking, the redbuds dressed in their deep purples and bright pinks and you cannot turn your head these days without seeing a robin, their fat orange chests stuck up in the sky as if to say – here I am – spring can start now. Life is happening all around us. And so is resurrection. This is the Good News in which we stand, that all the powers of oppression and hate cannot defeat the God who says “yes” to Jesus on Easter morning in the most unexpected and fantastic way imaginable. It is enough to stun us into silence.

What is remarkable about this moment that Mark captures is that we know the women didn’t stay silent. In fact, without women, there would be no pulpits at all for them to be kept out of by the church that wouldn’t exist, either. We know they spoke, and spoke loudly, and that Peter probably mansplained to them what they actually saw. We know that the story continued. That’s why we’re here. Sure maybe some of it is obligation, or habit, but I really would like to think that it’s because deep down, in the places we don’t let ourselves talk about nearly enough, we also have a dream, something transcendent that helps us through the challenges and suffering in life. We need that empty tomb.

The root for word “tomb” in Greek is the same as the word for memory – neumeon. It’s where we get mnemonic device, a technique for helping us remember things. So when the women arrive at the tomb what they literally ask is, “Who will roll away the stone from the door of our memories?” And when they are greeted by this “young man”, kind of a code for some angelic being, he says, “Remember what Jesus told you – He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

Living as Easter people means that we live remembering what Jesus has told us, which stands in great contrast to what the world teaches. And though we may be no more likely than the disciples to remember, or to follow, that doesn’t mean that we don’t continue to remind ourselves. So, on Easter, as we claim again that he is risen, let us also remember that Jesus taught us:

• Our greatest command is to love God with all our heart, mind and strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
• Greatness in God’s kin-dom is measured in humility and generosity.
• Money and power are inherently dangerous, they can get in the way of connection to God and to other people.
• And maybe the most important thing to remember after the cross – violence is not God’s answer to sin, nor was Jesus a sacrifice to appease an angry God – that God is not the Father that Jesus taught us about.

He is risen. And we are meant to be Easter people, living out these memories, in the spirit of resurrection, continuing the story of the Gospel, picking up right at the end of that dropped sentence, practicing the kin-dom right here and now in the ways that we live, working to structure our lives together in ways that reflect kin-dom life.
I dare say that’s why we’re here this morning, to hear the stories once again and to reinforce our faith with rituals, like coming to this table, where everyone is welcome and all are fed, without cost and without exception – a model for how we might think of shaping the world outside. This is our spiritual gym, a place we condition our souls for the work outside this place – protecting the environment, caring for the poor, forgiving often, rejecting racism, fighting for the powerless, sharing earthly and spiritual resources, embracing diversity, loving God and enjoying this life.

All ways in our time and place to live resurrection, as Easter people.

Christ is risen. Thanks be to God.